Nationalist Nonsense Again

Once again, the Scottish nationalists took to the streets, this time in Edinburgh, to demand independence and another referendum.

The nation-state was created as the political unit for capitalism in a series of changes which began four or five hundred years ago. It was accompanied by the growth of national consciousness. People were half encouraged and half forced to identify themselves with the countries they lived in. The fiercest jingo nationalism today is to be seen in the new nations. Before the nation-state, partisanship was related to small-scale economic interests. Wars were fought between cities, tribes and the proprietors of rival domains. The peasant population took part only to the extent that it was tempted or compelled to. The armies and mailed knights of the Middle Ages were mostly mercenaries. Nationalists argue that the problems of workers in a given country will be solved, and a golden age for them begin, by recovering or enlarging the country’s supremacy. This is the promise of nationalist leaders in new countries and is also being made by the Scottish nationalists.  Unfortunately, there is little evidence that this could be or has ever been so.  Pleasure in one's place or birth or culture he or she was brought up in has nothing to do with the matter. It is a reasonable sentiment on which nationalist fraud builds, but which capitalism will destroy without compunction.

Nationality is an accident. “Ours” is the deceitful word in nationalist propaganda the world over. In a newly developed country, nationalism is the demand of native capitalists to exploit the workers and peasants lest somebody else should do it and have the profits. What kind of “ours” is being talked about? In Britain and other industrialised countries workers talk about “our” trade, “our” reserves, “our” jobs allegedly taken by immigrants. They are not. They are all at the disposal of those who own the means of living. The worker has no claim on them: we owns nothing but our labour-power. There is a different affinity to recognise. This is the identity of interest of all those who live by selling their labour-power. The working class is worldwide, and as members of it become conscious of the nature of capitalist society and their position in it. The working class have no country. By persuading workers that they have a stake in “the nation”, capitalism obtains their support at critical times. What they should bear in mind is that the nation-state is the political institution of the capitalist system: its raison d'être is to keep the working class propertyless. Nationalism can do nothing for the workers except confirm or worsen their position. Socialism will mean the end of nationalities and frontiers.  Socialism sets out to abolish the antagonisms and divisions between the peoples of the world.

Part of the left has given up on the search of any alternative to capitalism in the name of the “realism” of nationalism. Nationalism is a capitalist ideology and expresses the “yearnings” of the national bourgeoisie for a nation of its own, i.e. a home market and the right to exploit its own people. The workers simply yearn for an end to all oppression.

As the Edinburgh Anarchists put it “an independent Scotland would in most respects have resembled the Scotland of the UK, a patriarchal, capitalist, environmentally destructive society. A country with the most unequal land ownership in the developed world – where 50% of the land is owned by just 432 individuals. A country dependent on North Sea oil for much of its exports – oil that must be left in the ground to prevent climate catastrophe. A country with huge poverty and huge wealth and little in the way of organised working class action to change that dynamic. And in so continuing to uphold the same institutions, the same structures of power, the same business interests, and the same political configuration, our fight against the state, capital and oppression continues.... We have a world to win and only our own working class self-activity and organisation will secure it.”

https://libcom.org/library/dont-mourn-organise